Annotation of wikisrc/users/jdf.mdwn, revision 1.2

1.1 wiki 1: [[!toc ]]
2:
3: # jdf's wiki page
1.2 ! wiki 4:
! 5: This is just my wiki page where I want to write down my goals, project ideas, running projects and what I generally want to do.
! 6:
! 7:
! 8: # project ideas
! 9:
! 10: These project ideas are not sufficient for the [[projects]], perhaps only my own stupid ideas, but what I would like to see for NetBSD. Some of them might be redundant with the official ones, but these are the ones I might personally take care of one day.
! 11:
! 12: * zfs -- there was an attempt to port zfs to NetBSD, but it stalled. Somebody to take care of zfs being imported to NetBSD, and running smooth, would be *very* nice.
! 13: * HAMMER -- I don't know much about it (see DragonFly BSD), but from what you can read, it seems very nice. Looking at the current state of Oracle and zfs, it might be better to care for HAMMER than zfs. On the other hand, zfs is very stable and widely distributed.
! 14: * unionfs -- there are some bugs with union I would like to see fixed. Imagine running a live CD by having a root read-only, and then simply mounting a tmpfs writable upon that.
! 15: * raidfs -- once unionfs is fixed, it could be possible to integrate a mirror, perhaps some redundancy checks with unionfs to have a flexible raid on vnode basis, not depending on the underlying filesystem or device
! 16: * update -- imho this is being worked on, but I don't remember who it was. Like the freebsd-update tool from FreeBSD, an easy way to update NetBSD base system from binary. Currently, you have to unpack manually and run [[!template id=man section="8" name="etcupdate"]], or use [[!template id=man name="sysinst" section="8"]] for this purpose. Running something that fetches the necessary updates and updates these files would be nice.
! 17: * bdutil -- a tool for unified disk editing, and not having to use [[!template id=man name="disklable" section="8"]], [[!template id=man name="gpt" section="8"]], [[!template id=man name="fdisk" section="8"]], [[!template id=man name="dkctl" section="8"]] separately, which can be very confusing, would be very nice. This shouldn't be too difficult. The functionality and the code is there, you just had to think of a usage, rewrite the frontend, and provide a compatibility mode for the old tools.
! 18: * userwiki -- I know this is a controversary topic... So no matter how and where, but having a place where users can contribute content in an ordered way (i.e., not on a mailing list), would be nice. See below for advocacy.
! 19:
! 20: I won't be working on this, as I'm not really into such low-level things:
! 21:
! 22: * run NetBSD in a web browser. There was a project which ran Linux in a web browser. If it's possible, NetBSD should run in a web browser, too.
! 23:
! 24:
! 25: # My personal interests
! 26:
! 27: I'm not into pkgsrc, but for the easy ones I use regularly, I try to help updating them.
! 28:
! 29: * fixing small userland bugs
! 30: * importing and caring for sysutils/fscd (a daemon to check service run state)
! 31: * writing mkdumpdisk - a tool to backup the system, including restore
! 32: * caring for [[!template id=pkg category="www" name="opera"]] being up-to-date
! 33: * caring for [[!template id=pkg category="devel" name="fossil"]] being up-to-date
! 34: * keeping the events site up-to-date
! 35: * improving [[!template id=man name="sysinst" section="8"]]
! 36:
! 37:
! 38: # Advocacy
! 39:
! 40: Imho, NetBSD currently doesn't have a good visibility in the Open Source community. These are my observations (if I knew solutions, I would write or apply them ;):
! 41:
! 42: * I have seen several smaller software projects which provide compiled binaries on their website, in many cases there was just a reference to "look into your system's package management, it's already there." For nearly all of them, the package is in pkgsrc, but the website doesn't reference it.
! 43: * Though NetBSD is represented at most of the larger Open Source events, the advocacy material could be updated. In central Europe, there are already new flyers, badges as giveaways, T-Shirts and badges to sell, but there could be more. If you have ideas, write to netbsd-advocacy@.
! 44: * There are many nice projects inside NetBSD, but they aren't visibile from the outside. [[!template id=man name="rump" section="3"]], [[!template id=man name="npf" section="3"]]? The new [[!template id=man name="apropos" section="1"]]? All the prestigous projects are often kept silent, commited, used, but nobody else knows about them.
! 45: * For contributors with "minor" interests, i.e. writing small articles, correcting manpages, committing small patches, it seems extraordinarily difficult to get things done. A user-commitable wiki, and some methods to improve developer-contributor communication might help here.